From Amarillo to Arlington, Texas universities, colleges, and community colleges offer a variety of criminal justice programs awarding everything from certificates to full four-year and advanced degrees. Criminal justice colleges in Texas offer students a choice of campus classes, online courses, or a combination of the two as they pursue a career in this field.

Training at Texas Criminal Justice Colleges

Studying criminal justice at Texas schools prepares students for a wide variety of law enforcement jobs in Texas, including police administration, criminology, criminal and defense law, psychology, corrections, and forensic science. Individuals with degrees in criminology often go on to law school, or work in prisons, probation, or private investigation. Many get police jobs in Texas. There are nearly 90,000 law enforcement officers working in Texas, and the number of jobs in that state is second only to California. There are more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies in Texas, far more than any other state, including California. Texas also has one of the highest concentration of detectives and criminal investigators per 1,000 working residents in the country.

Salaries and Outlook for Law Enforcement Jobs in Texas

On average, protective service workers in Texas--a job category that encompasses more than 250,000 police, firefighters, animal control officers, and parking enforcement workers--may earn about $37,000 a year. Nationally, workers in these fields earn a mean wage of nearly $42,000 a year, as per the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Police and sheriff's patrol officers make nearly $50,000 annually in Texas, and their supervisors make about $73,000. Detectives and criminal investigators make about $59,000 annually, a little less than the annual national average of $66,000. Nearly 25 million people live in Texas, and although the state has a reputation for being tough on crime, there is no shortage of crime to investigate or parolees to supervise and rehabilitate. In 2009, there were more than 120,000 violent crimes committed in Texas, and nearly a million property crimes. Among Texas cities with populations over 100,000 residents, the highest violent crime rate is in Frisco, a town of 108,244 residents, where there were 108 violent crimes in 2009, according to an analysis of U.S. Justice Department statistics. Houston, with a population of 2.2 million, had more than 25,000 violent crimes in 2009, the most of any city in Texas. Among cities with a population of more than 1 million, San Antonio had the highest violent crime rate with about one violent crime for every 175 residents.